As a kid in the early '60s, I saw some great movies at this theater in Sedalia, Missouri.

An Elegy for Moviegoing
By Philip Klein

The curtain falls on a ritual of American culture

For much of my life, it wasn’t a matter of whether we were going to see a movie on the weekend but which one. When I was a child, that meant leafing through the movie section of the local newspaper to see what was playing; as a teenager, I’d dial 777-FILM (“Hello, and welcome to Moviefone”); in my 20s, I’d check websites such as Fandango. But through it all, moviegoing was the default activity. If our first choice was sold out, we’d just see something else. Even if nothing was playing that we particularly wanted to see, we’d choose the movie with a showtime that worked best.

As I got older and took on more responsibilities, it became harder to get to movie theaters as often as I used to. Even as the activity became less a part of my own life, though, I took it for granted that a younger generation of moviegoers would carry on, and that theaters would always be there for me whenever I really wanted to see a film on a big screen. Sadly, I’m no longer confident that this will be the case.

These days, when I do manage to see movies, the theater is typically more empty than not. Things are sometimes so dead, it feels like I’m in a private screening room. I sit there and think about the massive footprint of the multiplexes, the number of employees required to keep them functioning every day of the year, the heating bills in the winter and cooling bills in the summer. I can’t see how the business model can be sustainable without the steady flow of customers purchasing tickets and overpriced refreshments.

That last paragraph struck kind of a different chord with me. Back in 1975, while in the Marines,
I was stationed at the Naval Air Tactical Training Center in Millington, TN. Just a little north of Memphis. A friend and I went into town to watch a movie. It was Charles Bronson in Hard Times. We were the only 2 in the theater and sat in the middle, about halfway up from the front. It was a great time. No distractions of any kind. I had never in my life experienced such a screening. I probably never will again. You just never sat or never imagined sitting in a theater with nobody else in it.

More here: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/07/an-elegy-for-moviegoing/

I identified with much of the above article as well as with some of the comments made at the end of the piece:

gary_s_padgett
Top Commenter
It is not the theaters that have destroyed the movie going behavior. It is the quality of the movies. They are crap now. They are riddled with political ideologies that offend half the public if not more.
The actors have become so politically active in their personal lives too that they have alienated half of their base as have the movie production companies.

Between the actors and the agendas of the companies making the movies they are the ones responsible for the decline in movie going.

oldschooldude
Hall of Famer
Back in the 20th century, after electricity was invented, I remember a big group of us meeting at my downtown Seattle apartment and walking from there to the Egyptian to see the director’s cut of Blade Runner. After the movie, we headed to a nearby place for beer and dancing. It wasn’t the movie itself that made the night so memorable—it was the whole experience.

Hourman
Hall of Famer
My take on what is wrong with the movies: every scene is too dark or has some odd tint to it. And every sound is too loud: the extreme close up of a mundane activity like opening the medicine cabinet with an eardrum-splitting sound of the light coming on and the cap coming off the ibuprofen bottle.
Then the predictability of the male and female protagonists hating each other until they suddenly decide to have sex while their Rainbow Coalition assortment of associates says they were rooting for them all along.